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Legitimacy in Autocracies: Oxymoron Or Essential Feature?

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Legitimacy in Autocracies: Oxymoron Or Essential Feature? A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Gerschewski, Johannes Article — Accepted Manuscript (Postprint) Legitimacy in Autocracies: Oxymoron or Essential Feature? Perspectives on Politics Provided in Cooperation with: WZB Berlin Social Science Center Suggested Citation: Gerschewski, Johannes (2018) : Legitimacy in Autocracies: Oxymoron or Essential Feature?, Perspectives on Politics, ISSN 1541-0986, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, Vol. 16, Iss. 3, pp. 652-665, http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1537592717002183 This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/218835 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle You are not to copy documents for public or commercial Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, If the documents have been made available under an Open gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. www.econstor.eu Legitimacy in Autocracies: Oxymoron or essential feature? Johannes Gerschewski [Please cite as: Gerschewski, Johannes, 2018, Legitimacy in Autocracies: Oxymoron or Essential Feature?, In: Perspectives on Politics, 16:3, pp. 652-665] Abstract: Legitimacy is a key concept in political science. It has deep normative roots in democratic theory and refers usually to righteous, just, fair, and therefore acceptable rule. However, non- democracies also try to create a following among their citizens. They also engage in justifying their rule through politicization, be it of religion, ethnicity, or ideologies ranging from left- wing communism to right-wing nationalism. Against this backdrop, this essay poses the question: does it make sense to use the concept of legitimacy for both types of regimes, democracies and autocracies alike? Or, do we overstretch the concept when transplanting it to the non-democratic realm? And, empirically, how can we assess to what degree a non- democracy is viewed as legitimate by its citizens? The essay aims therefore at (1) defining what legitimacy and legitimation is in autocratic settings; (2) drawing a semantic map of rival concepts like support, trust, and loyalty; and (3) tackling concrete challenges in measuring this elusive concept. Keywords: Legitimacy, Authoritarianism, Concept-Building 1 1. Legitimacy in an unlikely context? Is there something like legitimacy in autocracies1? Particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, this was a hotly debated question when scholars disagreed about the nature of Soviet-type regimes. While one camp argued that the communist regimes do indeed create legitimacy among its citizens, the other camp criticized these accounts for concept stretching and for neglecting the normative roots of the term legitimacy (e.g. Feher and Rigby, 1982; Pakulski 1986). For critics, there was no such thing as legitimacy in autocracies, let alone in communist regimes. This debate is not an outdated debate among old-fashioned scholars and Kremlinologists. Instead, it is a timely endeavor that has not lost its relevance for political scientists and practitioners. Around the world, we currently observe a rise of autocratic leaders that claim to be legitimated by their people. Ranging from Vladimir Putin in today’s Russia, to the general secretaries of China’s one-party-rule, but also to political leaders like Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey and Viktor Orbán in Hungary that gradually slide into authoritarianism, all of them claim to be entitled to rule by their citizens. The question of whether there is something like legitimacy in autocracies has also resurfaced in academia. Today, we know more about the inner workings of non-democratic regimes. In recent years, social sciences observed a renaissance in the study of comparative authoritarianism (Geddes, 1999; Pepinsky, 2014). Key institutions have been analyzed: from political parties (Brownlee, 2007; Magaloni 2006; Smith, 2005), to elections (Schedler, 2013; Gandhi and Lust-Okar, 2009), from parliaments (Gandhi, 2008; Gandhi and Przeworski, 2007) to informal power sharing arrangements (Svolik, 2009, 2012; Arriola, 2009; Magaloni, 2008). These institutions are understood to be crucial for autocratic rule. 1 There is a terminological debate about the differences between authoritarian and autocratic regimes. I perceive autocracy as the umbrella term that unites different forms of authoritarian, sultanistic, but also totalitarian regimes. As such, it is closest to mark the antipode to democracy. 2 Within this renaissance, a new strand of research has picked up the old legitimacy debate and asked whether autocratic regimes – besides using repressive techniques and co- opting potential elites – do stabilize their rule by seeking the support of the people (Dukalskis and Gerschewski, 2017; Kailitz and Stockemer, 2015; Grauvogel and von Soest, 2014; Gerschewski, 2013; Holbig, 2013; Gilley, 2009). From a rational perspective, this would make sense for the autocratic regime: Repressing opposition is a costly endeavor – at least in the long run. Repression creates counterproductive incentives as it spikes protest. From the autocrat’s perspective, these unintended consequences need to be avoided (Davenport, 2007). These researchers argue therefore that autocratic regimes need to legitimate their rule in order to maintain stable over a longer time period. Unless the regimes are mere kleptocracies or sheer tyrannies, they need to furnish a persuasive raison d’etre. In this light, this conceptual essay analyzes the capacity of the concept “legitimacy” to travel to the non-democratic realm. It poses the following questions: Is legitimacy the proper concept for social scientists to describe that autocratic rulers seek the support of the people? Or, do we overstretch the concept (and even fall in the trap of autocratic leaders) when we apply it to non-democratic rule? In other words, is “legitimacy in autocracy” an oxymoron, a “wooden iron”, or does it refer to an essential and stabilizing feature of autocratic rule? And finally, if legitimacy is indeed the proper concept, how do we know it when we see it? The remainder of the essay is structured as follows. I will first argue how we can define such a concept for autocratic regimes. Based on this definitional discussion, I will draw a semantic map of neighboring concepts and discuss their respective strengths and weaknesses. I will then clarify where the differences between legitimacy in autocratic and democratic regimes lie. Lastly, the challenges posed by measurement will be exposed, followed by a brief conclusion. 3 2. Systematizing concept analysis: The Ogden-Richards triangle A good starting point for any kind of concept analysis is the Ogden-Richards triangle (Sartori, 1984, pp. 22-23; Gerring, 1999; Schedler, 2011). It displays a trilateral relationship between the given name of a concept, its meaning (intension), and its empirical referent (extension). Take the following intuitive example: A ‘table’ (name) has the minimal meaning of a raised levelness (intension) that refers e.g. to a range of empirically observable tables in a seminar room (extension). The relationship between these three corners of the triangle is not always as straight forward as in the above example. If we translate the basic linguistic triangle to the social science world, several challenges arise. Yet, a systematic diagnosis of a concept takes seriously the relationships between name, intension, and extension. Let us first consider the relationship between name and meaning. While according to the famous French linguist de Saussure the name is given arbitrarily and usually based on social convention, the relationship between the name and the intension can be plagued by conceptual ambiguity. A 1:1 relationship between a given term and its intension may have been desired since Aristotle’s classic works, but the majority of today’s linguists agree that language is much fuzzier. In particular, the polysemic nature of concepts (one word, many meanings) troubles the work of social scientists considerably. Concepts cannot be clearly distinguished from each other, but instead overlap and so leave room for multiple interpretations. Together with their neighboring concepts, concepts form “semantic fields” that can be mapped (Sartori, 1970; Freeden 1994). Moreover, the relationship between the name and the meaning of a concept can suffer from definitional shortcomings. In general, the definition must be as sharp and parsimonious as possible and the defining features should inhibit sufficient discriminatory power vis-à-vis other features. The set of defining features 4 should also be jointly exhaustive and should be established at the same level of abstraction. A further demand is that a definition should not
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